The U.S. Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dan Brouillette to be the 15th secretary of energy by a 70-15 vote, setting the stage for former secretary Rick Perry’s deputy to lead the roughly $30-billion-a-year agency responsible for U.S. nuclear weapons, waste, and energy.
A Department of Energy spokesperson did not immediately reply to a query about when Brouillette would be sworn in as secretary. Brouillette had at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing been acting secretary for all of two days, following Perry’s resignation on Sunday.
Also at deadline, the White House had yet to nominate someone to replace Brouillette as deputy secretary.
Trump on Nov. 7 nominated Brouillette to replace Perry, and the nominee passed quickly last month through a hearing and vote by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
More senators from defense-nuclear states voted for Brouillette than against him, Democrats included.
Among the 15 “no” votes on the floor Monday were Nevada Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) and Jacky Rosen (D). Both have clashed with the Energy Department over its 2018 shipment of half a metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium to the Nevada National Security Site for temporary storage. Both also oppose the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to turn Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., into a permanent repository for civilian- and defense-origin nuclear waste.
“Mr. Brouillette was Deputy Secretary when DOE shipped weapons-grade plutonium to our state without our consent,” Rosen tweeted late Monday. “We must continue to demand transparency from this Administration’s Energy Department and rebuild trust.”
Cortez Masto touted Brouillette’s qualifications for the job, but said the matters of the plutonium shipment and Yucca were too much for her to overlook. In 2017, when she was Nevada’s junior senator, Cortez Masto was one of only 10 Democrats who voted to confirm Perry as Trump’s first secretary of energy.
Also voting against Brouillette’s confirmation on Monday was Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a whistleblower advocate from a state whose northern reaches are near the Hanford Site: the former plutonium-production campus that is now the largest and most expensive nuclear weapons cleanup in the country.
Wyden objected to confirming Brouillette on the grounds that the former auto insurance lobbyist and DOE hand would not answer questions about Perry’s role in the Trump administration’s dealings earlier this year with the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Those talks are now at the heart of the House’s effort to impeach Trump.
